Schedule a Class

Ellender Memorial Library offers diverse types of Information Literacy classes. At the most basic level, we offer a walking tour of the library, hosted by one of our librarians. This tour introduces students to the different departments on each of the three floors of the library, and can be geared towards addressing how the resources of these departments will help with specific assignments. In addition, we offer classes that focus on searching our Online Catalog (eLibrary) and our Databases. To that end, we have at our disposal a classroom with 30 workstations via the Ellender lab. In some cases, research librarians can collapse the two types of sessions into one by beginning with a tour which ends in the WAC lab classroom.

At the more advanced levels, we extend the offer to each professor and instructor to contact us to set up Research Methods (Information Literacy) sessions for specific courses. These sessions are usually best if they are assignment specific, although that is not necessary. In such cases, the reference librarian would spend the entirety of the session concentrating on either the research project at hand or the resources which the library offers in a specific subject area. As with the basic sessions, we emphasize hands on live searches, having students actually search the catalog and the databases after being shown how. In a typical 75 min session, there is time to go over the library layout, demo the catalog and one or two databases, and actually have students perform live searches to start on their projects. In a 50 min session, the live searching may be sacrificed, but the demos can be done so that students leave with a theoretical understanding of searching the databases.

To set up a tour or a session, contact Van Viator at extension 4661 or use this form.